Daily Tech News 11 August 2024

• A Florida data broker called National Public Data collected the personal information of essentially everyone in the US, UK, and Canada, and then got hacked. (The Register)
  
  2.9 billion records including names, addresses, and government ID numbers, plus information on relatives and address changes going back thirty years.
  
  Exactly how National Public Data got access to all this information is an unanswered question. They certainly didn't ask the people the data refers to, nor did they make any public announcement that they were doing this.
  
  
  
• The solution to that "unfixable" AMD security flaw from yesterday turns out to be a $9 SPI flash programmer.

• Terraforming Mars for $15 a day. (Science)
  
  Or maybe slightly more than that, but still surprisingly cheap on a planetary scale.
  
  The plan is to glitter-bomb the Martian upper atmosphere with two million tons of iron and aluminium dust per year, manufactured from the Martian soil.
  
  The trick is that the dust doesn't have to be delivered directly - getting it a hundred meters off the ground should be enough for the sandstorms to pick it up and do the rest of the work.
  
  This should warm the planet sufficiently that you won't immediately freeze, just asphyxiate. Making the air breathable is left as an exercise for the student.
  
  
  
• The SLS Block 1B second stage booster being built by Boeing for NASA has been slipping its schedule by one year per year for seven years. (Ars Technica)
  
  Originally due in February 2021 at a cost of $700 million, and rescheduled for April 2027 at a cost of $5 billion just last October - after a whole series of delays and overruns - it is now expected to cost at least $5.7 billion and won't be delivered until 2028 at the earliest.
  
  
  
• But $229 is $229. (Notebook Check)
  
  The Asus Vivobook 14 is available for that price at Best Buy right now.
  
  That gets you a Core i3 1215U - two performance cores and four efficiency cores, 8GB of RAM plus a spare memory socket, a 128GB M.2 SSD that you would probably want to replace right away, and a 1920x1080 IPS screen that covers 60% of sRGB.
  
  The screen is the only real problem there for basic use. Colours will more poop than pop with this one. You can get cheaper laptops but they will probably also come with meh screens, and they will have Celeron CPUs with no performance cores, making them about half the speed.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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